Page 291 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

2068 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

by about 2300 BCE, the competition between Umma and in 1200 BCE). In other words, the story of the ancient era
Lagash),which made it possible for Sargon of Akkad,from has rapid urban expansion at the center in its first half,
outside the Land of Sumer, to step in and subdue them. followed by deceleration and dispersal in the second.
The reign of Akkad and Sumer came and went, and was
followed by a native dynasty based on Ur.As late as about The Classical World
2000 BCE something of a numerical parity existed between The principal tendency of the classical era was the rapid
Sumer and non-Sumer cities, but a short time later the for- formation and subsequent consolidation of strongly
mer land of cities completely dropped out of sight.By con- regional but also interconnected urban systems in the
trast,important cities rose in Egypt (Memphis,Thebes,and four main regions of Eurasia: East Asia, South Asia, the
Heliopolis), in north Mesopotamia (Mari), and in the Mediterranean, and West Asia. A separate development
IndusValley (Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa). also occurred in the Americas. In the first three of these
The second basic trend was the experience of disper- regions we observe a thriving system of independent city-
sal, or more precisely, the spread of urban practices states, which then succumbs to imperial rule; but in West
throughout Eurasia that coincided with what in several Asia, the sequence is reversed, and in Mesoamerica, the
areas were described as “Dark Ages”—for instance, in Mayan system of city-states collapses by itself into
Sumer, in the Harappan region, and in post-Mycenean incoherence.
Greece. By the end of the ancient era (and the Bronze In East Asia, virtually all the principal urban growth
age), three of the four major regions of the “Old World” occurred in China. Haoqing (near Xi’an) was the West-
had been fertilized by the Urban Revolution: West Asia ern Zhou capital and ceremonial center that bridged the
(for instance, Babylon), the Mediterranean (Mycenae), ancient and classical periods.After its destruction in 771
and East Asia (Yin, near Anyang, a major Shang capital). BCE, the political center shifted to Luoyang, and in this
The less-than-successful experiments in the Indus Valley, Eastern Zhou era that followed, urbanization took off
in the Ukraine, and even in Peru would ultimately bear with considerable flourish. One report credits ninety-one
fruit, too.This dispersal was in fact a form of redistribu- cities as likely founded before 771 BCE, the number
tion, because while Sumer lost
cities and was virtually de-
urbanized, urbanism rose else-
where and the number of
world cities remained about
the same as it had been a mil-
lennium earlier (twenty-two in
2000 BCE became twenty-three

Cities have often been
protected by walls of all
types of shapes and
sizes and materials. This
drawing shows the wall
outside a Chinese city
in the late nineteenth
century.